In Spring 2023, a team of philosophers at Royal Holloway teamed up with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
They explored how visitors, volunteers, and staff at Kew’s Wakehurst site connect with nature amid rising global concerns about ecological anxiety, melancholy, and guilt.
Through interviews, embedded placements, and reflective conversations, the team constructed a typology of ways individuals articulate the benefits of visiting, immersing themselves in, or working with nature in Kew’s gardens for their wellbeing.
They also explored how these activities could address feelings of ecological grief and anxiety.
Some of the themes emerging from the study included:
- Positive feelings of joy and contentment amid natural surroundings often coexisted with underlying feelings of fear and despair regarding changes to the natural world.
- The participants' associations with ecological harm tended to be local rather than global, focusing on issues such as urbanisation and housing rather than solely on carbon emissions.
- Some participants viewed working with nature as a means of exerting control or restoring balance within nature, countering the feelings of being out-of-control and unbalanced often associated with the climate emergency.
- Many participants experienced a profound sense of ecological grief, often linked to a feeling of loss, often of childhood experiences of nature, felt to be richer and more intense.
- Visitors at the Wakehurst site often described their experiences in terms of adventure, wildness, multi-sensory engagement, escapism from ordinary urban life, and appreciation of seasonal changes.
